Thursday, June 19, 2008

Two weeks ago, I blogged about Acresso's decision to finalize the removal of the Stand Alone Build Engine from InstallShield 2009 Professional. This decision adversely effected certain long-term, loyal customers who had purchased maintenance agreements with the expectation that this core feature would remain. While I disagreed with the notion of InstallShield Professional not coming with a build box component for new customers, I found it utterly revolting that existing customers would loose this critical piece of functionality for which they had prepaid. Windows Installer Expert Stefan Krueger also shared his thoughts but a link to his blog ( InstallShield 2009 Caveats) is currently not available. Additionally many of my readers stood in solidarity and expressed their opinions to Acresso.

Over the past two weeks I've had back channel conversations with employees of Acresso and other members of the community. Today I have some progress to report: Jeff Greenwald, Director of Enterprise Product Management, has formerly announced that these customers will be taken care for this release. However, future versions of InstallShield will have the Stand Alone Build moved to Premiere so this fact should be considered when deciding your future purchasing options. I've also expressed some ideas on additional ways to sell the Stand Alone Build and Acresso will attempt to work out a business model that makes sense for all.

Below is the post from Jeff:

We recognize that their may have been some confusion regarding the availability of the Standalone build with the release of InstallShield 2009. To assist our longtime loyal customers in this transition, we are granting access to the Standalone build functionality under the following criteria. Specifically, InstallShield 2008 Professional customers on active maintenance who also licensed InstallShield Professional 10.x or InstallShield Professional 11.x will be granted access to the Standalone build functionality.

For future releases of InstallShield, the Standalone Build functionality will continue to be packaged exclusively with the Premier Edition as announced with the release of InstallShield 12 in 2006. InstallShield Professional customers looking to leverage the Standalone Build module will need to upgrade to the InstallShield Premier edition. Each full license of InstallShield Premier Edition includes 10 Standalone Build modules.Efforts are currently underway to update the Standalone build installer to support the model described above. Additional information will be posted to this community once these efforts are completed.

There's an old saying where I come from, it goes: "Fool me once... shame on... shame on you... ...Ya fool me... I can't get fooled again"

Am I the only person that's worried that Mac-resso-shield is going to some how screw this up for the rest of us? I can see it now, 'instead of giving 10 SAB licenses, let's charge for each and now make Premier users pay on a sliding scale based on the number of SAB instances they have installed, and we can control it all with our invasive & mathematically insecure FLEXnet licensing solution'... ARGH.

Ya know what, just shoot me now and let some new guy come in behind me with WiX, NSIS, Inno Setup, IzPack or whatever other install tool is least buggy this quarter. (*sigh*)